App HistoryShipped in April of 2012 on Windows Phone 7Shipped on WP8 in December of 2012Shipped Windows release in June of 2013Collaborations with multiple teams in US
Enables users to translate using keyboard in 40+ languages, 12 camera languages and 6 language for SpeechEnables user to translation w/o needing internet connection in keyboard and camera for 10 languages.
Online Translation Service provided by MSROffline TranslationCode moved from MSR services, and ported improved (perf) to work on mobile devicesSpeech TranslationIntegrating speech with translation pipeline
TrackerComputes camera motion between two images.Based on corner and edge detection plus complicated math OCRText extraction from images.That is what we do, Translator is just a hobby.Completely developed by Serbia team 12 languages for Translator, 22 overall, they will keep coming to TranslatorLatin, Cyrillic, Greek, EA scriptsCamera images, Scanned imagesIntegration into multiple Microsoft productsSkyDdrive (Search index, Text extractor)Bing (Media Search, document search)Office integrationIntegration of these two technologies make camera translation “magic”
XAML C# MVVM – UIOffline Translation C#Camera technologies are C++ (Ocr, Tracker … ) Assembly/compiler intrinsic when necessary. A lot perf issues that had to be overcomed in order to ship camera translation on WP7Rendering is XNA for WP and Direct3D for windows (moving to Direct3D)Windows Azure for language pack downloads, and Live Tile updates.
All core technologies are shared code bases+ LZMA + part of the app logic.C++ is still the most portable code (JS doesn’t come close)OCR runs on iOS, Android… Offline transition built as a service moved to mobile platforms using C#.API’s between the platforms are coming closer (Storage, Network, Direct3D, same .NET).XAML C# MVVM can be used on both platforms but different form factors require different UX
